


PROLOGUE

by floweryfran



Series: helter skelter [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Marauders Friendship (Harry Potter), Remus Lupin & Lily Evans Potter Friendship, Sirius Black & James Potter Friendship, dev patel as adult james potter 2020, everyone is an asshole until they grow up, itll be enormous but good hopefully, lily please read something that isn’t jane austen please, pumpkin heads and ducks, stick with me for this one folks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26207407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/floweryfran/pseuds/floweryfran
Summary: “We’re not in this place to be perfect, Peter,” James says to him, staring at the hovering moon, smoke clouding in front of his face. “We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to be, in the way we think we ought to.”“I don’t think I do a very good job of that,” Peter says.James looks at him, then looks away. “None of us do,” he says. “We all care the most about the things that don’t really matter in the end. What matters is us. Just us. We’re all fucked in the head, and—sweaty, really sweaty, and a bit brash, but we wouldn’t be us if we weren’t. We wouldn’t be doing the universe justice if we didn’t live the way she meant for us to.”A moment.“James?”“Yes, Pete?”“How do you think you’d want to die?”James closes his eyes. “With friends,” he says. “Quietly, and surrounded by friends. That’s when I’m at my best, so that’s how I want to go.”or, seven years is a long time. read closely, and there you'll find a glimpse of it all in clumsy unfolding fractals.
Relationships: James Potter & Lily Evans Potter, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape, Sirius Black & James Potter, Sirius Black & Remus Lupin & Peter Pettigrew & James Potter
Series: helter skelter [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2027170
Comments: 36
Kudos: 68





	PROLOGUE

**Author's Note:**

> in honor of september first, i’m throwing up the prologue for this monster. the rest of the fic will go up when it’s finished, which might not be until early october or possibly the year 2035. i promise, when it’s done, it’ll be posted. and i WILL finish it. 
> 
> [spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/58EDpvPaAmXvfO2lFM82Ry?si=Zekt7WnJTcOHJe6qaqZAaA)
> 
> [ where i sometimes post sneak peeks and updates and such <3](https://toujourspurdecoeur.tumblr.com/)

Yaqub “James” Potter is born breach under a sky so thick with rain clouds that the new moon cowers beneath the blanket of them as great shouts of thunder shake the very earth below. 

It’s an auspicious sort of birth befitting of a boy like him: the only child of rather aged parents willing to move mountains for him before he can so much as open his muddy brown eyes. Practically a prince. The very universe itself has collected him in its trembling palms and held him skyward, proud and promising. _This one,_ it says. _This one is mine._

James Potter is the predecessor of lightning, and that is important. 

He grows. His hair goes wild and his legs go long and his vision goes to shit before he’s old enough to spoon-feed himself. He’s a child of perpetual scraped elbows and untied shoes hidden beneath the folds of his dress robes. He’s loud, enthusiastic, and constantly on the run, none of which are behaviors improved by his utter friendlessness. Were it not the mixed muggle-and-magic community the Potters lived in forcing him into solitude, then it would be the looks his parents are given—with their Kulthi ki Dal and phirni and strange uncustomary customs. A boy taught both Latin and Tamil; a boy of the purest magical blood who never once attends a ritualistic meeting of the Sacred Twenty-Eight for the whispers that would carry behind him if he did: How could they be pureblooded? That family? Those clothes? Those Potters? It’s unnatural. It simply isn’t done. 

Isn’t done, indeed. But the Potters do. 

Instead of giving in to the desire to hide, James is carted to showcases for his father’s Sleekeazy hair product, taught to smile adorably, and told to stay quiet and out of the way, please. Pay attention, James, because this will be you one day. Pay attention, James, because this is how you must act. Pay attention, James, because this is what is expected of you. Do you understand? Good boy. 

James Potter, at age six, milling between the long legs of businessmen with his wide eyes and his eager hands, learns to smush himself flat like the inside of fancy bread, hidden between the walls of the crackled crust of himself, flour-dusted, the pretty centerpiece of a family so desperate to be perfect that they would bury themselves to do so. 

All the meanwhile, a rumble builds in James’s chest, vibrating against his bones. Within him stews the promise of a storm to come, and, as he grows, it does too. 

———

Sirius Black is a disappointment from the very moment of his grand entrance into the world of the living. 

It’s sunny, for one. Rays of golden light shout their way through the windows of Walburga’s bedroom, stripe their way across her soiled grey sheets; they throw the pale-faced lot of observing family into stark relief, like a crowd of spirits caught milling through August berry-patches. It’s unnatural. Uncouth. Unacceptable. 

Blacks aren’t meant to be born on sunny days—they’re simply not of the ilk. They’re moon-weaned, midnight blooded, comet-streak skinned. Why rely upon the warmth and weight of clear skies when there is something far more dependable, far more camouflaging, far more refined in the delicate silver of starlight? 

They’re made of that very stuff, every one, named for the dots-and-lines pictures made when one squints ever so slightly at the expanse of night. Constellation children, in brood and brawn and title. Effulgent matter. 

Names have power. That’s what Blacks believe. 

Thus, Sirius is damned from birth. 

Maybe his parents did despise him at first glance. Maybe it was clear even then that he was destined to be a boot-wearing, scruffy-haired Rolling Stones fan with an attitude problem and a special sort of interest in all things slightly strange, slightly skewed, slightly twisted. A matchbox boy with a lock-picking finger and a smile like sunrise on a lake: simmering, sharp, too bright to look at head-on. 

Or maybe they didn't. Maybe no parent could imprecate their child on purpose, and maybe, at first glance, Walburga stared into Sirius's muddy new-born eyes and felt something in her stomach go light. Maybe he was, for a while, loved. Maybe, when you think about it, it's much worse if he was.

Nevertheless, they name him after the dog star—the bright one, yes, but too the one in the shadow of Orion, the hunter, the bold, the hero. Behind that, Sirius sits, a single speck trying its damnedest to shape up. To sit as tall, to talk as smartly, to walk as weightlessly. 

He never does. 

When Sirius is barely two, Regulus is born, and he, as well, is a star. Sirius is meant to be brighter, brightest, but you’d never know. Not with the way Regulus comes into the world, quiet and polite, almost meek, beneath the navy one o’clock sky. Perfectly behaved. A raincloud boy. A suitable son. And, more than that, luminescent. 

Still, Sirius learns his Latin, French, and Italian. He reads by age three, writes by four, begins to study both piano and violin by five. He tries to be good. Better. Best. 

His first bout of accidental magic is so enormous that the living room falls to pieces. Portraits tumble off the walls, their inhabitants shouting in fear. The carpets unravel to string. The fireplace roars to life, the flames a perfect, angry crimson. The windows shatter. The chandelier falls, right at Sirius's feet.

For that, Sirius is belted. 

Sirius is raised to follow a strict set of rules. The rules are thus: your money, your status, your blood, your family, your magic, is pure. Anyone less than you is unworthy. You must work to live up to what you’ve been given by your family. Be grateful for your family. Be grateful for your blood. 

Sirius hears the way his parents talk about their neighbors—the ones Sirius sees but never meets. They sit at the window in ornately-carved armchairs with opera glasses perched on their noses and watch the muggles mill about the square. _Disgusting. Unworthy. Walking about as if they own this land, as if it breathes for them. They deserve worse, worst. They deserve burning and drowning and hell. They’re nothing. They're ungrateful. They’re dirty._

At age seven, after asking how magic makes blood cleaner, Sirius decides, through the haze of pain his mother’s first Cruciatus inflicts, that he will be nothing like his parents. That he will take the arsenal of skills they give him—his languages and his potions and his drawing lessons and his pride and his _easy, easy hate,_ for Merlin's sake, it is so much easier to hate than to forgive, than to love—and he will make them hear him. He marches loud, while Regulus sits and sketches. He yells about muggle rights, about mudblood rights, and Regulus hides in the attic as Sirius tells him to. Sirius is punished behind the closed doors of the library, imagining their tapestry emblazoned on his eyelids, and he hates.

Every morning, he reminds himself. Every morning, he ticks another day off on his calendar. Every morning, Sirius Black rises as if ready for war. 

———

Remus Lupin, from birth, perhaps, lives in a constant state of _this might as well happen now._

When Remus is two, his mum leaves home to spend a year on an archeological dig in Egypt, uprooting pyramid bases from under tons of sand to piece together a bit of the past the way he presses the pieces of his favorite around-the-world puzzle into place. A new picture. Ah, this makes sense now. Now I see it. 

When Remus is three, his mum returns, but since she left he’s been snatched up from his yard and bitten round the waist by a werewolf named Greyback, landing him in Saint Mungo’s for a month, three days of which are spent (screaming, terrified, confused) in solitary confinement. Even a werewolf pup no longer than a ciabatta loaf is a threat, he’s told. He—fanged, bleeding, a boy—believes it. 

When Remus is four, his father builds an underground bunker outside their home. Remus is meant to transform there, alone, locked in. At first, he paws at the door and cries weak, wolfish tears, terrified and lonely down to the marrow of his bones. Later, he snaps at the lock, teeth sharp and mind emptied but for _kill and blood and rip and tear and hungry huNGRY hungry please please—_

When Remus is five, Remus is carted out of his daycare center in tears because of the way a round-headed boy named Theodore badmouthed Lyall Lupin’s motions in support of those infected with Lycanthropy, which, when presented to the appellate division of the Wizengamot, garnered quite an awful lot of negative attention, the meat and potatoes of which is directed, of course, towards the Lupin family. _Questionable,_ people said. _Why, all of a sudden, does he care so much? Lyall Lupin, who wanted wolves dead? Who told the Prophet and the Daily Wiz and anyone who would listen that they ought to be put down? What are you hiding, Lyall? What is your evil?_

_(My son,_ Lyall swallows down. _My son, my son.)_

And so on, until Remus is finally, gloriously, eleven. 

Remus had been dreading eleven. He was sure it would be nothing more than a kick between the legs for him, though it would be the most wonderful, most celebrated of affairs for all other wizarding children. No party for Remus. No crowd of friends running through the yard, and no stack of presents ceiling-high. Just a mug full of loneliness and a stolen sprig of aconite to ease his aches. No one could blame him for wanting to stay in his room, hidden beneath his sheets, nursing his newest moon-wounds and watching a fern spill over the edges of a pot in the corner. 

But, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, Remus's expectations are wrenched sharply leftward. Albus Dumbledore appears in his white-haired, purple-robed glory, sitting in an armchair by the living room fireplace like something out of a fairytale, and gives Remus Lupin something he's never had before—something precious and porcelain and thin-walled and _breakable_ but _wonderful:_ something to look forward to. 

———

Peter Pettigrew is firstborn to a muggle father and a witch mother, and he’s got the face of an angel. He's cherubic, rosy-cheeked and brown-eyed and blond, like something out of Botticelli’s soupy dreams that never quite transferred onto the canvas. 

His parents do what parents do: hand the blanket-wrapped loaf of him around and take photographs and set him in the wheely hospital crib, like _that’s enough for one day,_ like _that was fun and all, but…_ like _we’re stuck with him now, aren’t we?_

When Peter quickly grows cold and lonely, he begins to cry. 

They let him. 

For hours, the sun shines and the birds twitter and Peter Pettigrew lays in his crib and cries fat, heart-wrenching tears that drip down his cheeks in rivulets like strands of lace ribbon. His parents chatter with guests, _Oh, he’s just fine, they all do that at first!_ and Peter cries. The sunshine cowers behind thick cloud cover and Peter cries. His mother walks laps around the floor of the maternity wing and visits the room of incubators to wave through the window and Peter cries. Peter cries until the nurses take him from the room with a reproachful glare at his parents. The first one to hold him is blond and kind-eyed—like his mum, but not, because _she_ doesn't say, "Oh, he's probably prematurely colic or something," and then smile for a photograph.

This is what Peter learns: no matter how loud you shout, no one will hear you. 

This is what Peter learns: a stranger will always care more than someone who loves you. 

This is what Peter learns: how to grow just slightly left of the spotlight. That’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it’ll always be. Second best. 

**Author's Note:**

> subscribe to stick with me on this one! leave me a comment letting me know what you like so far! or what you want to see! or just saying hi! go join me on tumblr! let's be friends!


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